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I 10x’d the quality of my site. Google’s response: rank it lower.
Posted by on March 8, 2026 at 5:20 pmI run a niche review site in the Dutch web hosting space. Built it since 2020. Honest reviews, actually testing every product, good design, well-structured content. Was ranking well: peaked at about 16K keywords mid-2025.
Then the core update hit. Lost roughly 2/3 of my ranked keywords in a few months. Standard story for a lot of us, I know.
Here's where it gets interesting. Starting in January, I did a massive overhaul. Not the usual "delete thin content and pray" approach. I'm talking:
- Built interactive tools that actually help visitors make decisions
- Went radically honest in reviews
- Created a free WordPress video course
- Built and released a free WordPress theme
- Completely redesigned the site
The site became objectively, measurably better. More useful, more complete, more honest.
Google's response? Rankings dropped further.
Not posting this to complain. I've actually moved past it: diversified into paid channels and other traffic sources, and honestly feel much better not optimizing for an algorithm anymore. But I think the data point is worth sharing. When quality improvements correlate inversely with rankings, something is seriously messed up with the system.
I wrote up the full story with a chart of the decline if anyone wants the details (can't drop the link here since that seems to go against the rules of this subreddit).
Curious if others have experienced the same: making genuine improvements and seeing rankings drop in response.
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1 Reply
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Well have you got any real feedback on your “overhaul” changes from real users who are not connected with you?
Because Navboost is a real thing. If people like what your site is giving them, it will start ranking higher for those terms.
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Interactive tools sound heavy and at risk of shifts clipping etc. How’s the page speed report looking?
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This shows once again that Google is not a quality assessment engine. Quality and usefulness have never been ranking factors.
And while the actions you took might be useful to your readers, none of these are going to help your SEO.
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Did you keep the slugs?
Also I can imagine the full overhaul meant you changed Title, Meta, content etc. This would mean that Google has to recrawl everything
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What’s the content of your site. That’s the real truth here.
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The site got better. Is that a guess? That’s something you should investigate with usability testing. Read “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”.
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I didn’t read that whole thing but Google doesn’t judge quality. Quality is very subjective.
To rank higher on Google You need more topical authority then the person ranking above you
You also need on your web page topical relevance. Notice I said web page not website. Google is a page ranking system.
You need some content it doesn’t have to be good content There’s no such thing when it comes to software. I wish there was I’m actually a good writer
And finally you need no penalties
SEO is not a checklist it’s a competition.
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Always thought Google was invincible for search and now they are wiped out and barely used.
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Okay so 16k keywords and you lost 2/3 of them. What was your placement for all of those keywords?
And your solution was to remove half of your pages?
Makes sense why it’s “performing worse” if that is the kpi you’re tracking. Did your organic traffic get cut by 2/3? Which pages lost organic traffic?
As others have said, all of these improvements that you said you made have nothing to do with SEO. There’s simply not enough info here to tell you what happened.
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In this process, did you remove pages? In my experience, it’s so much better to improve rather than remove.
Google works in mysterious ways and sometimes crappy pages can do really well.
Also for the tools you built it’s possible Google can’t see them, I’ve seen this happen on vibe coded tools and pages where Google doesn’t wait for scripts to load, so though the UX is good, Google can’t or doesn’t want to see the page.
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That’s because website quality is not a ranking factor. Next, when you make changes to a site (good or bad), your position might change because you did something different and how have to be reevaluated again.
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